Far Enough
by Chelbi
Summary: She'd meant to run. She'd meant to stay away from him. She'd meant for him to survive, but they didn't run far enough. What can she mean to do now?
1. Too Soon

Summary: She'd meant to run. She'd meant to stay away from him. She'd meant for him to survive. Now... what can she mean to do?

Yuuki Cross stood in the middle of a starlit field, idly braiding her long hair with trembling fingers. She pulled it apart and began again, sighing against the shorter locks that refused to obey her fingers' actions. However, she didn't really have the energy to fight against them; her thoughts were too preoccupied with other matters.

She and Kaname Kuran had been on the run for two months. When they set out they knew they had nowhere to go, but of course Kaname hadn't been worried about that. Yuuki blindly followed her brother, trusting completely in his abilities and plans. If they ever came close to being discovered, she assured herself it was entirely her fault. Which led to her current predicament.

Their closest encounter yet had come just six hours earlier. They were passing through another town, common travelers with hoods pulled low over their faces, when Yuuki just had to ruin it all. Her clumsiness had caused her to fall, and even as a vampire a twisted ankle does tend to twinge a bit. She insisted she was fine, but Kaname assured her in return that they could take a moment to let her rest and heal perfectly.

"There's no sense in traveling on an injury," he'd promised her. "We'll only wait five minutes."

In those five minutes, their entire plan, both of their lives, plus one other's could have been destroyed.

Kaname, it seemed, had underestimated a certain former classmate's abilities. Even though he had previously acknowledged the skills the man had gained by growing up the child of hunters, he failed to account for the addition of his vampire nature and his twin's life, both of which had happened to sharpen his skills to a much higher level than Kaname had originally anticipated.

So when only three minutes had passed and Kaname suddenly grabbed her arm, dragging her as quickly and inconspicuously as possible through the streets, Yuuki felt just slightly alarmed, "Kaname-onii-sama, what's wrong?"

"Nothing will be wrong if we leave this town immediately," he responded, looking down at her with an attempt at a reassuring smile. She nodded a little, though some part of her didn't believe him. If there was one thing she had learned about Kaname in all her life, it was that he wasn't shaken easily. And, currently, he appeared more shaken than she had ever seen him.

Once they were outside the town's walls and no longer limited by the guise of humanity they broke into a full sprint, Kaname staying just slightly ahead of Yuuki in order to guide her. After they had run like this for about ten minutes, Yuuki finally asked, "How far do we have to go to 'leave town', Kaname-onii-sama?"

He started to slow, deliberating before dropping the run completely and opting instead for a casual walk. Having been surprised by his sudden stop, Yuuki had accidentally jumped several yards ahead of him, and turned to watch him walking toward her. "I suppose this is sufficient," he mused, "although we shouldn't stop yet."

"What's going on?" she asked, a small tremor running through her voice. "A moment ago you were certain that we'd be fine waiting for five minutes, and now we can't stop for a breath at all?"

"Do you need to catch your breath?"

"No, but that isn't the point," she sighed, walking beside him. He adjusted his stride to fit hers, waiting for more of the harangue he knew was coming. "The point is, you're worried about something, Kaname-onii-sama, and I... I want to know what."

He looked down at her, his normally composed face slipping just enough to show a piece of the incredulity he was feeling. "You mean to tell me that you honestly didn't feel a thing when we stopped back there?"

"No."

"Well, I suppose you are still fairly new in adapting to your abilities, so it would be natural for you to miss it..."

"_What did I miss_?"

He sighed again, this time more pronounced as he ran a hand through his messy hair. "When you hurt your ankle, everything was fine. I wasn't lying when I said that we would be wise to wait; there was nothing to press our advance. But then... we hadn't moved for three minutes and I felt... an unpleasantly familiar aura." He paused slightly before continuing, his tone just a bit sharper, "I thought it best to avoid meeting its owner."

"It wasn't," Yuuki gasped, coming to a dead stop as she processed his words. He continued walking, however, and she had to hurry after him and pull on his hand to make him face her again. "You... Kaname-onii-sama, do you mean you felt... you felt _Zero _back there?!" The mask slipped further and Kaname's lips curled down at the corners as he nodded. "He came _that _close to us?!"

"Closer than you think, unfortunately, or you would still be running," Kaname insisted, nudging her to at least walk again. There was a small silence as their pace increased again, both trapped within their own thoughts as they proceeded to the place they had currently deemed safe.

Yuuki was still having trouble deciphering her reaction. She couldn't allow herself or Kaname to be found by Zero. She couldn't let it happen. If he found them, they would have to fight. If they fought, one of them would die. And if one died, the other would die as well.

So why had the thought of seeing him made her heart jump at the time?

She knew that at one point in her life, she had almost considered Zero a brother. Back when she couldn't remember anything before a bloody, snowy night. Back when Kaname was her senpai and far out of her reach. Zero had come to her home, even more broken than when she had first appeared on the Chairman's doorstep, and she'd accepted him easily. Graciously.

But now she had Kaname. All Zero had for her was a bullet from the Bloody Rose, followed by another for Kaname and then for himself. No matter what she felt toward him now, she could not allow that to happen. She wouldn't. "That's all there is to it, then," she murmured to the rising sun, finally allowing the braid to stay in her hair. "We were careless and almost caught. It can't happen again. We'll just have to run farther tomorrow."

Without another hesitation she strode back toward the tent Kaname had erected for them, but stopped short as something tugged on the edge of her consciousness. Her brow furrowed slightly and she looked back across the clearing, wondering what it could have been. But as soon as she'd turned fully around she felt a body close behind hers, and an arm wrapped protectively around her shoulders as her brother's voice growled, "You sensed _that_, right?"

Her eyes widened as she looked up, trying to tilt her head to see his face. His gaze, however, was fixed on a spot directly across from them and Yuuki's heart dropped when she connected his words and his earlier explanations.

With the feeling of searching for Death, she swept her eyes across the field and almost cowered when they met a pair of hard, silver eyes behind the barrel of a steel gun pointed directly for the head above hers.

Zero Kiryu's expression held no mercy as he spat, "You didn't run far enough, purebloods."

xxx

A/N: Well, I hope you liked it. Odd cliffhanger, I know. I'm thinking about adding a second chapter to this, but... This was really just written on a whim while I'm sitting bored in my room watching t.v. I've been wanting to write something for Vampire Knight for a while and have an actual plot in mind, though this fic is made of certain scenes that I'm trying to connect together rather than an actual plot. Oh well. I suppose I'll leave it up to reviews. So if you read it and liked it, will you leave me one, pretty please?

-Chelbi


	2. Supposed To

The world seemed to be standing still; what had previously been a normal night filled with the sounds of insects now lay hushed as if nature itself could feel the intensity of the battle brewing before it. None of the participants moved for a long moment until Kaname's arm finally tightened marginally around Yuuki's shoulders. "I suppose I should give you some credit for your bravery," he remarked, voice cold, "since you did not merely shoot without showing yourself."

"I don't want your praise," Zero spat in return, eyes narrowing dangerously. His knuckles were white around the gun's frame, and he knew that any normal gun would have shattered long ago under the pressure. Just like any other person faced with his situation would have.

"Would you prefer an insult?" Kaname drawled on, ever-so-slightly beginning to edge Yuuki to his side. "It was foolish of you to expose yourself... Even with the Bloody Rose, you have no hope of defeating two pureblood vampires alone, Kiryu. Your courage will be your death."

Yuuki gasped softly, eyes widening at the lone hunter standing across from them. Her heart tore between the love for the man behind her and the concern for the man ahead. Zero spared her a quick glance, but his silver eyes almost immediately returned to what he perceived as the greatest threat. '_This can't be happening..._' Yuuki thought desperately, feeling her entire body tense with the strain of her thoughts. '_I was supposed to run; he was supposed to live! I... I only kept him alive for two months?!_'

"You're wrong about that, Kuran," Zero replied. "I'm not fighting two pureblood vampires. I'm only fighting you."

"Do you underestimate Yuuki by that much?"

"Of course not," he said obviously, tone depicting the roll his eyes dared not perform. "But you're closer to her than I am right now, so tell me... Is she calm and ready to kill me?"

Kaname started to snarl, but he managed to catch it just before it slipped past his lips. He was holding Yuuki's shoulder, so he'd definitely felt her tense. As Zero's words settled across the field and around her, she began to shake and looked at the grass, murmuring, "He's not supposed to die yet, Kaname-onii-sama... he's not supposed to die..."

He frowned deeply. "He knew what he was doing when he revealed his presence, Yuuki," he said softly, trying to reassure her even as he nudged her farther behind himself. "He knew that when we saw him it would come down to his life or ours. You don't want me to die, do you?"

"No!"

"And I know I will never let you die," he responded, "so there can only be one option. Won't you choose it, Yuuki?"

"Stop playing mind games with her, Kuran!" Zero shouted, taking two deliberate steps across the clearing. "It isn't her fault that you're afraid to fight me alone!"

Kaname turned fully toward Zero, releasing his hold on Yuuki's shoulder now that she was three-fourths hidden behind him. He glared with a fury that the boldest man would have feared, but his opponent held his ground. "That is nothing more than a desperate cry from a man facing the firing squad of his past," he finally murmured. "Those words do nothing to increase your strength, Kiryu. You can't hope to defeat me by talking."

"Then why haven't you attacked yet?" Zero taunted, flexing his trigger finger slightly. "If you're so confident in your own abilities, why haven't you just killed me instead of wasting all this time with chit-chat?"

"My primary concern is and always will be Yuuki. Even someone as dull as yourself should be able to recognize that. Her safety was more important than your death." Yuuki, emitting another tiny gasp, grabbed two fistfuls of her brother's shirt, tugging on it as if to get his attention, but he stayed her demand by gently pulling her fingers loose from the cloth.

"No, it wasn't for her safety," Zero's words ghosted across the clearing like a fog. It crept slowly, and Yuuki awaited its lifting with trepidation. "Yuuki is and always will be your primary focus, I'm not arguing with you there. But Yuuki's safety wasn't the first thing on your mind when you saw me, was it? Your first thought was instantly killing me, and then the second... the second was wondering what her reaction would be to my death."

The fog cleared slightly at the same time as Yuuki's vision. Kaname's figure had been blocking out most of the clearing, but as it suddenly disappeared everything came back into sharp focus. She looked around desperately, listening for sounds of struggle and waiting for the smell of blood, praying it would not be a gunshot that gave away their location.

"Kaname-onii-sama!" she cried into the dawn, spinning a circle. She knew why he would take the fight away from her, but she couldn't just sit there and wait for one of them to come back. She didn't know who it would be, and for a moment, she didn't know who she _wanted _it to be.

That thought stopped her cold halfway through another circle, and she sank slowly onto the dewy grass. '_Of course I want it to be Onii-sama..._' she thought softly, clutching her hand at her heart. '_If Zero came back, that would mean... Onii-sama... lost..._' She stared vacantly at the ground, wisps of escaping hair framing her vision. '_Onii-sama can't lose, but... Zero...'_

A gunshot emanated from a distance to her left, and her head whipped toward it just in time to hear a loud crash and watch a tree dive to the ground. She whimpered softly in despair, turning toward the felled tree and slowly inching nearer. Who or what now housed that bullet? Whose body had been the tree's axe?

She leapt to her feet as another earsplitting crash mocked her, tearing through the forest's silence as fully as it tore through her heart. Her feet moved slowly but unerringly to the sound, beginning to move faster as an eerie silence took the place of the crashes. She darted through the trees, ignoring the small cuts left by passing branches, knowing they would heal faster than she could notice them.

Finally she vaulted over the fallen tree and arrived in a small clearing that had been made slightly larger by the number of broken trees littering its perimeter. Her eyes found her brother first, scanning his body to determine the cause of the blood running down his side. Morbidly, she felt almost thankful that the wound across his ribs seemed to have been made by claws and not by a gun of any kind.

Then her eyes moved to the space opposite him, and she froze at the sight of Zero's injuries. Thin lines of red trickled down his right arm, and judging by the fact that they weren't healing Yuuki could only assume that he'd been grazed by his own weapon. Blood ran freely down the left side of his face, originating from a wound hidden under his silver hair. Anger-tainted eyes rose to meet hers before dropping to her feet, and suddenly Kaname was speaking,

"Yuuki, look out!"

Almost frozen from confusion, she barely managed to jump to the side, tripping as she landed and rolling to a stop a few feet from where Kaname had shouted. She stared at the place she had previously been standing, eyes widening as Zero stood straight again to fend off Kaname's counterattack.

'_Did he really just use me to get an opening on Kaname-onii-sama?!_" she thought hysterically, trying to account for why he had lunged at her the moment she appeared. She looked at the spot again, failing to put two and two together, unable to find the second two.

Suddenly Zero flew across the field again, blood trailing after his body as he slammed into an already broken stump. "You would risk pulling Yuuki into this fight in order to get your weapon back..." Kaname muttered, slowly stalking across the field with something silver glinting in his hand. "I thought I despised you before, but I was clearly mistaken." Yuuki watched his palm open, displaying the form of the Bloody Rose, and she finally understood--Zero had been lunging for the weapon at her feet, not for her.

"Shut up and shoot me, if that's what you're going to do," Zero spat, struggling to sit against the stump as more blood flowed down the side of his neck. He tried to will himself back up, willed his legs to move when he knew they couldn't, and he scowled deeply at his failure. At the same time, though, he almost embraced death, as it meant he wouldn't have to... "It's your lives or mine, right? So take it; I know you just want me out of your way."

"I want you much more than out of my way," Kaname replied coldly. "I want to completely obliterate you, Zero Kiryu. I want you to feel such pain that you think you're already dead, writhing in the hell you're destined to occupy, before I eliminate you. However, you served your purpose at one time, so..." Zero stared evenly down the barrel of the Bloody Rose, watching it center between his eyes as it had so many times before. He braced for death at its trigger, as he had so often. But this time, he unconsciously let himself do something he'd never condoned before that moment: he let his eyes snap to Yuuki, to get one last look at her face before he never saw anything again.

One desperate scream ripped the world into chaos.

Zero could still feel his head attached to his neck, and he knew that he should have been in pieces. At the same time this realization hit, he felt thick, warm droplets hit his face, concurrent with the smell of Yuuki's blood in his nose. His eyes snapped up and widened marginally at the scene before him.

Yuuki stood with one hand clinging to Kaname's arm, the other hand clenching the Bloody Rose's barrel, pointed at the free-flowing wound in her right shoulder. Kaname was staring at her incredulously, his left hand shaking against his side, his right prevented from doing so by his sister's fingers. It took Zero a half second to catch up, trying to match this image to the one he'd been looking at moments before. She must have leapt across the distance between them just after he'd looked at her and at the exact same time Kaname started to pull the trigger. By the time she'd reached them, grasping the gun away from Zero's forehead and toward her own body, it had been too late for even Kaname's quick reflexes to stop the shot.

He barely put it all together before he unconsciously blurted out, "What are you doing, Yuuki?!"

She glanced over her shoulder at him with a soft smile, color draining from her face with each heartbeat, as she answered, "You're not supposed to die yet, Zero."

xxx

A/N: Thanks for reading again! There will most likely be a third chapter to this story, as I'm having fun just letting whatever wants to be written be written. Although it may end up making for a slightly hyperactive story, I hope you'll enjoy it anyway. And you'll definitely review if you liked it, right? Haha!

-Chelbi


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